Dark Elixir Is the Real Bottleneck, and Your Drills Will Never Fix It
Updated: 18 September 2026 · Goblins Farm
Gold gets talked about because walls are expensive and the number is enormous. But gold arrives constantly and dark elixir does not. Adding up what a maxed account owes in dark elixir against what the game gives you produces a gap so wide it reframes most progression advice, and it explains why accounts stall exactly where they stall.
What a maxed account owes
Three bills, all summed from the game files:
- Heroes — 57.5 million dark elixir. Six heroes, 474 levels, and only the Grand Warden is funded by elixir instead.
- Pets — 24.2 million. Twelve pets, 782 days of Pet House time, added to the game long after the economy around them was designed.
- The dark side of the laboratory — 18.6 million. Every dark troop and dark spell research.
Total: roughly 100 million dark elixir, before a single Super Troop boost at 25,000 a time.
What the game gives you
A Town Hall 18 village may place three Dark Elixir Drills. A maximum-level drill produces 20,000 dark elixir per 100 hours — 200 an hour. Three of them is 600 an hour, or 14,400 a day, and only if you collect before each drill's 4,600 storage fills.
One hundred million divided by 14,400 is 6,944 days. Nineteen years.
This is not a complaint, it is a diagnosis. The drills are not meant to pay for your account and they never have been. Every serious dark elixir income is raided, which means the resource that gates your heroes and pets is the one that requires you to attack well, repeatedly, for years.
Gold and elixir are no better — which is the actual lesson
Run the same arithmetic on the other two resources and the picture is worse, not better:
- Gold. Seven maximum-level Gold Mines produce 756,000 per 100 hours each — about 1.27 million a day combined. A maxed village needs 15.38 billion gold. That is 12,100 days, or 33 years.
- Elixir. Seven Elixir Collectors at the same rate against roughly 5.2 billion elixir of buildings, research and Grand Warden levels is about eleven years.
So the collectors do not fund the village in any resource. They are a trickle that keeps a casual account moving and a rounding error on a serious one. Everything you will ever build is paid for by attacking, and the only question is how efficiently.
Why accounts stall at Town Hall 14 and 15 specifically
Because that is where the dark elixir bill jumps and nothing about your income changes.
Through Town Hall 13 dark elixir has two mouths: heroes and dark research. At Town Hall 14 the Pet House arrives with twelve pets and 24.2 million dark elixir behind it, and it competes directly with the heroes you have not finished. Your drills produce the same 14,400 a day they did before. Your raids produce whatever your attack quality produces.
The players who get through it are not the ones with better bases. They are the ones who arrived at Town Hall 14 with heroes close to done and storages full, which is the specific advice in the Town Hall 13 post and the reason it is worth repeating.
What to actually do about it
- Farm dark elixir deliberately, not incidentally. Dark elixir storages are usually central and normal farming armies do not reach them. A dedicated dark elixir routine is worth more than any upgrade order.
- Never let heroes idle. A hero not upgrading is dark elixir you are not spending, and unlike gold there is no wall to dump the surplus into. Upgrade one, attack with the other five.
- Stop boosting Super Troops out of habit. 25,000 dark elixir is 1.7 days of full drill production, and every Super Troop is weaker per housing space than the troop it replaces.
- Treat the Grand Warden as free progress. He costs elixir, not dark elixir, so he can level while your dark elixir goes elsewhere. He is the only hero who does not compete.
How we counted
Hero, pet and research costs are summed from Clash of Clans' own game files, the same source as every stat table on this site. Production rates are the files' own per-100-hours figures for maximum-level drills, mines and collectors at Town Hall 18, multiplied by the number of each building a Town Hall 18 village may place.
Deliberately excluded: raided loot, Star Bonus, Clan Games rewards, Season Challenges, treasury income and anything bought with gems. Those are exactly the sources that make the game playable, and the point of leaving them out is to show how completely the passive economy depends on them.
Frequently asked
How much dark elixir does it take to max Clash of Clans?
About 100 million: roughly 57.5 million for heroes, 24.2 million for all twelve pets and 18.6 million for dark laboratory research, summed from the game files. Super Troop boosts are extra at 25,000 each.
How much dark elixir do drills produce?
A maximum-level Dark Elixir Drill produces 20,000 per 100 hours, or 200 an hour. A Town Hall 18 village may place three, so 14,400 a day if you collect before each drill's 4,600 capacity fills.
Why does my account stall at TH14?
Because the Pet House arrives with 24.2 million dark elixir of upgrades behind it while your dark elixir income does not change. It competes directly with heroes you have probably not finished, which is why arriving at Town Hall 14 with heroes close to maxed matters more than any other preparation.
Goblins Farm is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or specifically approved by Supercell. Clash of Clans is a trademark of Supercell Oy. This material is unofficial fan content produced under Supercell's Fan Content Policy. Game values change with every update; always verify in-game before committing an upgrade.